alt Hacker NewsI use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job. I barely ever write code by hand anymore. I don't blindly accept the code that it writes, I iterate with it. We review code at my work. I have absolutely found a lot of benefit from my tools.
I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually, and took a day or so using agentic tools.
A few very concrete advantages I've found:
* I can spin up several agents in parallel and cycle between them. Reviewing the output of one while the others crank away.
* It's greatly improved my ability in languages I'm not expert in. For example, I wrote a Chrome extension which I've maintained for a decade or so. I'm quite weak in Javascript. I pointed Antigravity at it and gave it a very open-ended prompt (basically, "improve this extension") and in about five minutes in vastly improved the quality of the extension (better UI, performance, removed dependencies). The improvements may have been easy for someone expert in JS, but I'm not.
Here's the approach I follow that works pretty well:
1. Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible. Tell the agent to analyze the code and make a plan based on your spec. Tell the agent to not make any changes without consulting you.
2. Iterate on the plan with the agent until you think it's a good idea.
3. Have the agent implement your plan step by step. Tell the agent to pause and get your input between each step.
4. Between each step, look at what the agent did and tell it to make any corrections or modifications to the plan you notice. (I find that it helps to remind them what the overall plan is because sometimes they forget...).
5. Once the code is completed (or even between each step), I like to run a code-cleanup subagent that maintains the logic but improves style (factors out magic constants, helper functions, etc.)
This works quite well for me. Since these are text-based interfaces, I find that clarity of prose makes a big difference. Being very careful and explicit about the spec you provide to the agent is crucial.
Replies
> I'm quite weak in Javascript.
> I use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job.
Your story checks out.
Great advice.
> Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible.
I have recently added a step before that when beginning a project with Claude Code: invoke the AskUserQuestionTool and have it ask me questions about what I want to do and what approaches I prefer. It helps to clarify my thinking, and the specs it then produces are much better than if I had written them myself.
I should note, though, that I am a pure vibe coder. I don't understand any programming language well enough to identify problems in code by looking at it. When I want to check whether working code produced by Claude might still contain bugs, I have Gemini and Codex check it as well. They always find problems, which I then ask Claude to fix.
None of what I produce this way is mission-critical or for commercial use. My current hobby project, still in progress, is a Japanese-English dictionary:
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> I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually
A 1-week project is a medium-scale project?! That's tiny, dude. A medium project for me is like 3 months of 12h days.